The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

by Wallace Stevens

  Bare beggar-tree, hung low for fruited red

  In isolated moments—isolations

  Were false. The hidalgo was permanent, abstract,

  A hatching that stared and demanded an answering look.

  XXVI

  How facilely the purple blotches fell

  On the walk, purple and blue, and red and gold,

  Blooming and beaming and voluming colors out.

  Away from them, capes, along the afternoon Sound,

  Shook off their dark marine in lapis light.

  The sea shivered in transcendent change, rose up

  As rain and booming, gleaming, blowing, swept

  The wateriness of green wet in the sky.

  Mountains appeared with greater eloquence

  Than that of their clouds. These lineaments were the earth,

  Seen as inamorata, of loving fame

  Added and added out of a fame-full heart…

  But, here, the inamorata, without distance

  And thereby lost, and naked or in rags,

  Shrunk in the poverty of being close,

  Touches, as one hand touches another hand,

  Or as a voice that, speaking without form,

  Gritting the ear, whispers humane repose.

  XXVII

  A scholar, in his Segmenta, left a note,

  As follows, “The Ruler of Reality,

  If more unreal than New Haven, is not

  A real ruler, but rules what is unreal.”

  In addition, there were draftings of him, thus:

  “He is the consort of the Queen of Fact.

  Sunrise is his garment’s hem, sunset is hers.

  He is the theorist of life, not death,

  The total excellence of its total book.”

  Again, “The sibilance of phrases is his

  Or partly his. His voice is audible,

  As the fore-meaning in music is.” Again,

  “This man abolishes by being himself

  That which is not ourselves: the regalia,

  The attributions, the plume and helmet-ho.”

  Again, “He has thought it out, he thinks it out,

  As he has been and is and, with the Queen

  Of Fact, lies at his ease beside the sea.”

  XXVIII

  If it should be true that reality exists

  In the mind: the tin plate, the loaf of bread on it,

  The long-bladed knife, the little to drink and her

  Misericordia, it follows that

  Real and unreal are two in one: New Haven

  Before and after one arrives or, say,

  Bergamo on a postcard, Rome after dark,

  Sweden described, Salzburg with shaded eyes

  Or Paris in conversation at a café.

  This endlessly elaborating poem

  Displays the theory of poetry,

  As the life of poetry. A more severe,

  More harassing master would extemporize

  Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory

  Of poetry is the theory of life,

  As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,

  In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,

  The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.

  XXIX

  In the land of the lemon trees, yellow and yellow were

  Yellow-blue, yellow-green, pungent with citron-sap,

  Dangling and spangling, the mic-mac of mocking birds.

  In the land of the elm trees, wandering mariners

  Looked on big women, whose ruddy-ripe images

  Wreathed round and round the round wreath of autumn.

  They rolled their r’s, there, in the land of the citrons.

  In the land of big mariners, the words they spoke

  Were mere brown clods, mere catching weeds of talk.

  When the mariners came to the land of the lemon trees,

  At last, in that blond atmosphere, bronzed hard,

  They said, “We are back once more in the land of the elm trees,

  But folded over, turned round.” It was the same,

  Except for the adjectives, an alteration

  Of words that was a change of nature, more

  Than the difference that clouds make over a town.

  The countrymen were changed and each constant thing.

  Their dark-colored words had redescribed the citrons.

  XXX

  The last leaf that is going to fall has fallen.

  The robins are là-bas, the squirrels, in tree-caves,

  Huddle together in the knowledge of squirrels.

  The wind has blown the silence of summer away.

  It buzzes beyond the horizon or in the ground:

  In mud under ponds, where the sky used to be reflected.

  The barrenness that appears is an exposing.

  It is not part of what is absent, a halt

  For farewells, a sad hanging on for remembrances.

  It is a coming on and a coming forth.

  The pines that were fans and fragrances emerge,

  Staked solidly in a gusty grappling with rocks.

  The glass of the air becomes an element—

  It was something imagined that has been washed away.

  A clearness has returned. It stands restored.

  It is not an empty clearness, a bottomless sight.

  It is a visibility of thought,

  In which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once.

  XXXI

  The less legible meanings of sounds, the little reds

  Not often realized, the lighter words

  In the heavy drum of speech, the inner men

  Behind the outer shields, the sheets of music

  In the strokes of thunder, dead candles at the window

  When day comes, fire-foams in the motions of the sea,

  Flickings from finikin to fine finikin

  And the general fidget from busts of Constantine

  To photographs of the late president, Mr. Blank,

  These are the edgings and inchings of final form,

  The swarming activities of the formulae

  Of statement, directly and indirectly getting at,

  Like an evening evoking the spectrum of violet,

  A philosopher practicing scales on his piano,

  A woman writing a note and tearing it up.

  It is not in the premise that reality

  Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses

  A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

  THINGS OF AUGUST

  I

  These locusts by day, these crickets by night

  Are the instruments on which to play

  Of an old and disused ambit of the soul

  Or of a new aspect, bright in discovery—

  A disused ambit of the spirit’s way,

  The sort of thing that August crooners sing,

  By a pure fountain, that was a ghost, and is,

  Under the sun-slides of a sloping mountain;

  Or else a new aspect, say the spirit’s sex,

  Its attitudes, its answers to attitudes

  And the sex of its voices, as the voice of one

  Meets nakedly another’s naked voice.

  Nothing is lost, loud locusts. No note fails.

  These sounds are long in the living of the ear.

  The honky-tonk out of the somnolent grasses

  Is a memorizing, a trying out, to keep.

  II

  We make, although inside an egg,

  Variations on the words spread sail.

  The morning-glories grow in the egg.

  It is full of the myrrh and camphor of summer

  And Adirondack glittering. The cat hawks it

  And the hawk cats it and we say spread sail,

  Spread sail, we say spread white, spread way.

  The shell is a shore. The egg of the sea

  And the egg of the sky are in shells, in walls, in skins


  And the egg of the earth lies deep within an egg.

  Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through.

  Have liberty not as the air within a grave

  Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native,

  In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.

  III

  High poetry and low:

  Experience in perihelion

  Or in the penumbra of summer night—

  The solemn sentences,

  Like interior intonations,

  The speech of truth in its true solitude,

  A nature that is created in what it says,

  The peace of the last intelligence;

  Or the same thing without desire,

  He that in this intelligence

  Mistakes it for a world of objects,

  Which, being green and blue, appease him,

  By chance, or happy chance, or happiness,

  According to his thought, in the Mediterranean

  Of the quiet of the middle of the night,

  With the broken statues standing on the shore.

  IV

  The sad smell of the lilacs—one remembered it,

  Not as the fragrance of Persephone,

  Nor of a widow Dooley,

  But as of an exhumation returned to earth,

  The rich earth, of its own self made rich,

  Fertile of its own leaves and days and wars,

  Of its brown wheat rapturous in the wind,

  The nature of its women in the air,

  The stern voices of its necessitous men,

  This chorus as of those that wanted to live.

  The sentiment of the fatal is a part

  Of filial love. Or is it the element,

  An approximation of an element,

  A little thing to think of on Sunday walks,

  Something not to be mentioned to Mrs. Dooley,

  An arrogant dagger darting its arrogance,

  In the parent’s hand, perhaps parental love?

  One wished that there had been a season,

  Longer and later, in which the lilacs opened

  And spread about them a warmer, rosier odor.

  V

  We’ll give the week-end to wisdom, to Weisheit, the rabbi,

  Lucidity of his city, joy of his nation,

  The state of circumstance.

  The thinker as reader reads what has been written.

  He wears the words he reads to look upon

  Within his being,

  A crown within him of crispest diamonds,

  A reddened garment falling to his feet,

  A hand of light to turn the page,

  A finger with a ring to guide his eye

  From line to line, as we lie on the grass and listen

  To that which has no speech,

  The voluble intentions of the symbols,

  The ghostly celebrations of the picnic,

  The secretions of insight.

  VI

  The world images for the beholder.

  He is born the blank mechanic of the mountains,

  The blank frere of fields, their matin laborer.

  He is the possessed of sense not the possessor.

  He does not change the sea from crumpled tinfoil

  To chromatic crawler. But it is changed.

  He does not raise the rousing of fresh light

  On the still, black-slatted eastward shutters.

  The woman is chosen but not

  Among the endlessly emerging accords.

  The world? The inhuman as human? That which thinks not,

  Feels not, resembling thought, resembling feeling?

  It habituates him to the invisible,

  By its faculty of the exceptional,

  The faculty of ellipses and deviations,

  In which he exists but never as himself.

  VII

  He turned from the tower to the house,

  From the spun sky and the high and deadly view,

  To the novels on the table,

  The geraniums on the sill.

  He could understand the things at home.

  And being up high had helped him when up high,

  As if on a taller tower

  He would be certain to see

  That, in the shadowless atmosphere,

  The knowledge of things lay round but unperceived:

  The height was not quite proper;

  The position was wrong.

  It was curious to have to descend

  And, seated in the nature of his chair,

  To feel the satisfactions

  Of that transparent air.

  VIII

  When was it that the particles became

  The whole man, that tempers and beliefs became

  Temper and belief and that differences lost

  Difference and were one? It had to be

  In the presence of a solitude of the self,

  An expanse and the abstraction of an expanse,

  A zone of time without the ticking of clocks,

  A color that moved us with forgetfulness.

  When was it that we heard the voice of union?

  Was it as we sat in the park and the archaic form

  Of a woman with a cloud on her shoulder rose

  Against the trees and then against the sky

  And the sense of the archaic touched us at once

  In a movement of the outlines of similarity?

  We resembled one another at the sight.

  The forgetful color of the autumn day

  Was full of these archaic forms, giants

  Of sense, evoking one thing in many men,

  Evoking an archaic space, vanishing

  In the space, leaving an outline of the size

  Of the impersonal person, the wanderer,

  The father, the ancestor, the bearded peer,

  The total of human shadows bright as glass.

  IX

  A new text of the world,

  A scribble of fret and fear and fate,

  From a bravura of the mind,

  A courage of the eye,

  In which, for all the breathings

  From the edge of night,

  And for all the white voices

  That were rosen once,

  The meanings are our own—

  It is a text that we shall be needing,

  To be the footing of noon,

  The pillar of midnight,

  That comes from ourselves, neither from knowing

  Nor not knowing, yet free from question,

  Because we wanted it so

  And it had to be,

  A text of intelligent men

  At the centre of the unintelligible,

  As in a hermitage, for us to think,

  Writing and reading the rigid inscription.

  X

  The mornings grow silent, the never-tiring wonder.

  The trees are reappearing in poverty.

  Without rain, there is the sadness of rain

  And an air of lateness. The moon is a tricorn

  Waved in pale adieu. The rex Impolitor

  Will come stamping here, the ruler of less than men,

  In less than nature. He is not here yet.

  Here the adult one is still banded with fulgor,

  Is still warm with the love with which she came,

  Still touches solemnly with what she was

  And willed. She has given too much, but not enough.

  She is exhausted and a little old.

  ANGEL SURROUNDED BY PAYSANS

  One of the countrymen:

  There is

  A welcome at the door to which no one comes?

  The angel:

  I am the angel of reality,

  Seen for a moment standing in the door.

  I have neither ashen wing nor wear of ore

  And live without a tepid aureole,

  Or stars that follow me, not to attend,

  But, of my being an
d its knowing, part.

  I am one of you and being one of you

  Is being and knowing what I am and know.

  Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,

  Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,

  Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,

  And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone

  Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,

  Like watery words awash; like meanings said

  By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,

  Myself, only half of a figure of a sort,

  A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man

  Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in

  Apparels of such lightest look that a turn

  Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

  THE ROCK

  AN OLD MAN ASLEEP

  The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping, now.

  A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity.

  The self and the earth—your thoughts, your feelings,

  Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot;